Objective We propose a new method to measure health inequalities caused by conditions amenable to policy intervention and use this to identify health differences between sexes and age groups.Methods The lowest observed mortality rates are used as a proxy of unavoidable mortality risks to develop...

Life expectancy at birth is the most commonly used measure for health system output. However, there are a number of reasons why it may be a poor proxy. First, life expectancy assumes a stationary population and thus does not take into account the current demographic structure of a country; and...

This paper proposes a new method to measure health inequalities that are caused by conditions amenable to policy intervention. The method is built on a technique that can separate avoidable and unavoidable mortality risks, using world mortality data compiled by the World Health Organization for...

Objective- We show that a standardized Gini coefficient that takes into account the feasible range of health inequality for a given health attribute is a better instrument than the normal Gini coefficient for quantifying inter-individual health inequality. Methods- The standardized Gini...

This paper develops a method to conduct non-hierarchical bivariate decomposition of Theil indexes. The method has the merits that, first, it treats all variates symmetrically and therefore facilitates the comparison of inequalities associated with different variates; and, second, it highlights...